As stunning as Bill [tag]Clinton[/tag]’s interview on [tag]Fox News[/tag] was, no one should overlook the fascinating interview the former president did yesterday with MSNBC’s Keith [tag]Olbermann[/tag]. (C&L has some of it, and MSNBC has clips of nearly all of it.)
Olbermann, as he is wont to do, asked a poignant question: “This is not what we’re supposed to be about and when we talk about rewriting the Geneva Conventions, or when we talk about demonizing dissent, or even putting just a bad face on dissent in this country, are we not getting closer to what the terrorists want us to change any way?” Clinton had a positive, forward-thinking response.
“Let me at least put it in positive terms. I think that the terrorists have an ideology, right? With an ideology, you know the answer anyway, right? You have a dictated result, therefore, evidence, argument, old-fashioned standards of fact, all irrelevant. You know where you want to go, and if somebody disagrees with you, they are less human than you are, and they deserve to be a terrorist target.
“Now, the way we play the game, at our best moments, is that we don’t have an ideology with a predetermined outcome. We have philosophies. Dominantly, we have a conservative philosophy and a progressive philosophy, and it sort of tells kind of where we’re likely to be, but we’re all interested in evidence and argument and learning.
“And the great test of America has always been, does it work? Are people better off if we do it or not? And we just keep growing and learning in that climate, always with one dominant conservative stream, one dominant progressive. And the debate and the tension and the learning has been great for us.
“So what we don’t want to do is, no matter how scared we get — and it’s OK to be frightened by the prospect of horrible things happening — we don’t want to respond to this terror threat in a way that fundamentally alters the character of our country or compromises the future of our children, because that’s what makes it great being American.
“And the evidence is that a democratic society that is constantly, relentlessly learning and searching is the best antidote to the terrorist model. These guys are real good at tearing down. They’re not particularly good at building up, and there’s no reason we should help them by making the case for them by something we do.”
That’s a spectacularly good answer. I’m just not sure if Clinton’s entirely right.
The former president explained his belief that all of us, as political observers, approach the debates and discourse with certain beliefs, but those beliefs dictate “where we’re likely to be” — that doesn’t change the fact that everyone, on both sides, is “interested in evidence and argument and learning.”
I want to believe that’s true. Recently, however, I’ve begun to think otherwise. Everything that I’ve seen in recent years suggests there’s a fundamental difference in the way the left and right approach public policy. For the left, it’s about producing a desired policy goal. For the right, the goal of an action is far less relevant than the action itself.
Jonathan Chait explained this extremely well in February.
We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.
The contrast between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, then, ultimately lies not only in different values or preferences but in different epistemologies. Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy — more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition — than conservatism.
Now, liberalism’s pragmatic superiority wouldn’t matter to a true ideological conservative any more than news about the medical benefits of pork (to pick an imaginary example) would cause a strictly observant Jew to begin eating ham sandwiches. But, if you have no particular a priori preference about the size of government and care only about tangible outcomes, then liberalism’s aversion to dogma makes it superior as a practical governing philosophy.
Consider the tax-cut argument in 2001. Bush’s sales pitch was all over the map in explaining why the cuts would be worthwhile. On different occasions, Bush insisted tax cuts for billionaires are a good idea when the economy is bad, when the economy is good, when the deficit is low, when the deficit is high, when the public needs to spend more, when the public needs to save more, and when energy costs are too high. One quickly got the impression that the tax cuts were not about achieving a desired policy goal — the tax cuts were the policy goal.
The same applies to privatization. The right will argue that privatizing a government service — say, Social Security to take a random example — will produce a variety of policy goals (broader wealth, increased savings, fewer government expenditures, lower taxes, etc.) When faced with empirical evidence that privatization wouldn’t generate those goals, the right will offer a different policy rationale. If it’s debunked as well, it doesn’t matter because the right wants privatization anyway. Their ideology dictates that privatization is, prima facie, superior. Whether it achieves an additional policy goal doesn’t matter, because privatization is the policy goal.
As this relates to the public discourse, Chait said it makes “empirical reasoning pointless.” For most conservatives, the logical process “begins with the conclusion and marches back through the premises.” It prompted Paul O’Neill, Bush’s former Treasury secretary, to note that when dealing with Bush administration officials, “You don’t have to know anything or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.” Clinton told Olbermann that the “great test of America has always been, ‘does it work?'” Unfortunately, the great test of the Bush gang is “whether it works doesn’t matter.”
Oddly enough, I think Bill Clinton knows this better than anyone, and his comments to Olbermann were a subtle rebuke of right-wing thinking. When he describes the terrorists’ ideology as one that discards “evidence, argument, [and] old-fashioned standards of fact,” Clinton must also realize he’s describing the guiding ideology of the Bush White House and its allies in Congress.
Clinton was right to say that the best antidote to the terrorist model is a “democratic society that is constantly, relentlessly learning and searching.” It’s a shame his Republican critics disagree.
Post Script: Sorry for length of this post. It’s a subject I think about a lot.